Rock of Ages is back on stage rocking Toronto - more schlocky than ever, for better or worse

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• Title: Rock of Ages
• Book by: Chris D’Arienzo
• Director: JP Gedeon
• Actors: AJ Bridel, Trevor Coll
• Company: More Entertainment
• Venue: Elgin Theatre
• City: Toronto, ON.
• Year: Runs to May 20, 2023

I never thought Rock of Ages was for the ages. But here the jukebox musical is, back on a Toronto stage, once again rocking out with its schlock out.

The surprisingly enduring Broadway show from the oughts – which goofily spoofs 1980s big-hair rock culture and style even as it embraces that decade’s tunes – is at the Elgin Theatre through May, in what is its second major commercial production in this city.

More Entertainment, a new theatre company, has put together a big-budget revival that features an up-for-it Canadian cast with vocal chords of steel nailing a non-stop set list of songs by the likes of Whitesnake, Poison, Twisted Sister, Foreigner and Styx.

If you’re coming to feel the noise, you certainly won’t be disappointed by these voices or the accompanying guitar solos, which are appropriately wicked. (A fierce band of five musicians, scattered around the theatre and often letting it rip in long-haired wigs on stage, is led by Mark Camilleri.)

The comedic and storytelling aspects of Rock of Ages, however, could use more calibration in director (and More Entertainment chief executive officer) JP Gedeon’s laser-filled, but not always laser-focused production.

Not that the story in Rock of Ages could ever be particularly hard to follow.

Its A-plot is a conscious confection of cliché: Sherrie (AJ Bridel from Kinky Boots), an aspiring actress from small Texas town, takes a midnight train heading to Los Angeles, where she ends up working as a waitress at a club on the Sunset Strip called the Bourbon Room alongside wannabe rock star Drew (Trevor Coll).

The two quickly fall in love through a rousing mash-up of Extreme’s More Than This, Mr. Big’s To Be With You and Warrant’s Heaven.

(You may – like me – not remember the names of these bands, but the tunes themselves must have been banging around in my head somewhere, as Bridel and Coll’s renditions released pleasurably nostalgic bursts of rock-cognition.)

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Sherrie and Drew’s romance is then, just as quickly, imperilled by the arrival on the scene of preening sexual predator Stacey Jaxx (Jonathan Cullen, the show’s comic standout by far), lead singer of a hard-rock band called Arsenal.

Meanwhile, the Bourbon Room itself, run by a Big Lebowskian figure named Dennis Dupree (Kent Sheridan, with a well-aged voice like a gravel smoothie), is threatened by a father-and-son team of German developers named Hertz (Larry Mannell) and Franz (Tyler Pearse).

These bad guys in bad accents, ones apparently still okay to employ in the 2020s as they were in the 1980s, want to increase the urban densification in LA – and are opposed by a rogue urban planner named Regina Kuntz (Steffi Didomenicantonio).

Things really were different back then, I guess. Rock of Ages, in particular, mocks the in-yer-face sexism of the eighties, though it would hard to get a jury of audience members to unanimously rule on to what extent this shameless show with scenes set in strip clubs also recreates that sexism in the process.

One thing that has changed since Rock of Ages was last in Toronto a little more than a decade ago (courtesy of Mirvish Productions), however, is that there’s an intimacy co-ordinator on the creative team.

This is just as well, as Gedeon’s production involves more gross-out fluid swapping than anything else I’ve seen on a stage since COVID-19 came calling.

An absurd bathroom orgy is a highlight of Sean Cheesman’s choreography, which makes fine use of athletic and deadpan ensemble members.

But the physical humour elsewhere can be more miss than hit, and there’s a sense of slapdash to some of the non-choreographed staging. The show is a spoof, of course, but the relationships could be more rooted and resonate.

The set by Nick Blais is a series of metal staircases and platforms, plus diamond-shaped screens that descend from above the stage and display projections of fragments of buildings and structures (and the occasional Max Headroom-inspired animation).

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Gedeon’s place-setting is similarly abstract: I wasn’t always sure when the story was shifting locations, where individual scenes were taking place, or even if they were indoors or outdoors.

That dramatic disconnect doesn’t really affect your ability to follow what’s going on, however. The Bourbon Room’s sound guy/the show’s omniscient narrator Lonny (Dave Comeau, who is a little too frantic in his funny business) is on hand to rehash and make fun of the plot at regular intervals.

The script by Chris D’Arienzo, which has always been self-referential, has been updated with jokes about the musical’s unexpected longevity, its 2012 movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise and, on the night I was there at least, former Toronto mayor John Tory’s fall from grace.

That reinforced, for me, that Rock of Ages is really just a Christmas pantomime without the Christmas. Indeed, the last time I was in the Elgin Theatre – for producer Ross Petty’s final Peter Pan-theme holiday show – a character also sang Steve Perry’s Oh Sherrie.

We’ll see in coming years if More Entertainment is on the scene to replace that style of show in Toronto – or whether it has larger artistic ambitions. Rock of Ages is a perfectly solid start, in any case.